i recently bought a usr 56k faxmodem. it worked fine for a day, then started giving me all sorts of errors saying that there was no dialtone. i called the tech support and they said that the modem was probably faulty and i should replace it. so i did. when i got my new modem, the same thing is happening. when i go to the modem properties. my modem is on com 3 and when i go to more info it gives me the message of "port already open". now it seems to work fine, somtimes, but it always starts with that error message at 9:00 at night. at 9:00 it just disconnects me and tells me that there is no dial tone. help would be greatly helpful.

At 9pm every night? How weird. Is your phone line or ISP on some kind of (BT) Surftime package, e.g. where it works in one way during certain times and another way at other times, such as having 2 different numbers to dial?

Although surftime changeovers normally occur at more like 6pm or 7pm in the evening, maybe the times are a bit messed up and your ISP dialler software needs to be re-installed?

If you're on Windows NT / 2000 / XP, go to a command prompt and type at and hit Enter. That'll show you a list of scheduled programs (if any) and when they're due to run. Is there anything set to run at 21:00 ?

Have you got a mischievous virus?

If it stops working at 9pm, at what point does it start working again? As soon as you reboot I presume?